ENDURANCE, an autonomous vehicle designed to swim untethered under ice, will spend a month creating three-dimensional maps of the underwater environment. It also will collect data on the environmental conditions and take samples of microbial life. If all goes well, in the future NASA could send a similar probe to explore the ocean on Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

Read the daily blog entries written by scientists in the field as they work in Earth's coldest environment, testing the limits of ENDURANCE.